The clarion. [volume] (Jackson, Miss.) 1883-1888, 1887-04-06


market. Nothing is wasted. The table
living may not be of the greatest varie-
ty for the first few years, butit is whole
some and mostly home grown and home
made. Come with me and travel the
length and breadth of our grand Iowa.
See her fine homes, by the hundred
thousand; ninety per cent. of them had
just such small beginnings as ] have
described. Now look at our drawbacks.
See our long winter where we have to
house and feed our stock four to five
months. Think of the expense these
long cold winters necessarily involve.
| need not particularize; you all can see
this without. Now if we could make
such homes as are found all over New
England, from farming alone, on its
hard, sterile, rocky soil, if we could go
out on those bleak, cold, treeless prai-
ries far from market, and still compel
from all the discouraging and forbidding
surroundings, through individual in
dustry and close economy, good, COM
for able homes and a competency for
old age, would it not be insulting to you
fol one to say the same could not be
done here in this "Snnny South" where
soft winds blow the II months through? :?
Where markets are new and good;
where water and railway give ample
and competing facilities for reaching
these markets; where, too, the varieties
of crops have much wider range than
with us?
How to treat your soil, what crops to
raise, or which kind of animals to use,
are things we strangers from the North
are not mere to dictate or decide upon.
1t is reasonable TO suppose you know
better about these things than we do.
1t is understood, however, this conven-
tion has for one of its objects the en-
couraging of the dairy industry. This
is a branch of farming that has been
followed here only by very limited few
as we understand.
The first and main question, the one
that uuderlies the whole matter, Is this:
Have you a grass-growing soilg The
next is, do you. or can you have pure,
clean, wholesome water? These two
things are absolutely Indispensable to
successful dairying. If you have these
and at moderate cost, then if any of
the bovine race will do well, here the
dairy COW will, and hence the possibili
ty of dairying is assured. Even if grass
is somewhat of shy grower your abun-
dance of cotton seed and cotton seed
meal will supplement great lack, If
necessary, of grass; but We are to pre-
sumo that this convention is not gotten
up on mere suppositions We are to
take it that nature has done her part.
THAT every prospect pleases but only
man is perverse," and this meeting is to
self-convert him. | once read pa
per before one of our farm Associations
in Iowa, on how to make success by
farming on quarter section farm, and
| recollect that held that first of all as
prerequisite to success there must be
sboyhood on the farm" Homely and
simple as this seems, there is world of
meaning to it. A boy born and raised
on the farm is never conscious OF when
or how he learns the thousand and one
manipulations that come in everyday
farm life, to feed, milk and care for
COWS, and to do this in the right time
and way becomes a sort second nature,
a part of himself. TIE girls as we'll as
the boys of families on the farms of the
North, become experts in feeding pigs,
calves, chickens, and in milking, hand
ling milk, making butter and cheese,
and at the same time never are conscious
of it. At an hour, could your vision
reach far enough, you will see thou
sands of our daughters out in the yards
or barns with the shining tin pals milk
ing the gentle cows, and the next enter
tanning friends at the organ or piano, or
reading some paper of their own produc
ton before some village scientific or
literary society, or writing valuable ar
ticles for the ,blic press.
What | want most of all to impress
is this. One of the main things we wish
to educate our children in is ''self-reli-
ance," to have them feel sort of per-
feet independence, because of con
scious ability to do anything necessary
to be done upon farm; and then what
is lust as important, that it is not only
honorable, but laudable not only to be
able to do those things but to do them.
That honest, productive individual labor
is mark of honor and respectability,
and that not to know how to do these
things, or knowing how to be ashamed
to be seen doing them, is an evidence of
3 weak mind or a perverted educa-
ton.
Go through the length and breadth OF
the North to-day, and you will find that
our large farmers our best business men,
our merchant princes, our public officers,
yes. even the most of our millionaires
were once either hired men, or sons OF
small farmers who were compelled to
self-reliance from the very circumstances
of their life. Shall | be little free
here. and come pretty close home? One
of the great underlying elements that
| sapped, in the end, the institution OF
slavery was because that while labor in
one part of the nation was called mig
ger' it belittled and degraded labor
everywhere, hence either free labor OF
slave-labor must 60 down, and (begglne
your pardon, we laborers OF the NORTH
helped you of the South to that, which
in the end will prove one of the greatest
blessings as result that ever came
through the instramentality of s'mis
TAX" the mistake already alluded to.
But you must not expect to changt
the habits, customs, feelings and In
herited prejudices of generations in
day, vet the good time coming is fas
Fastening on. A grand, a glorious day
is reserved for you in this mild zonee
lSouth; your children and children'i
children will own and work their owl
numberless farms all over this sun
favored land. The time is coming wher
all over these now wide stretches o
houseless land will be seen the nea
white farm cottage of the small farmer
At short distance, at convenient eros
roads, will be met school houses crowded
with happy, laughing boys and girls
who in few years will go forth int
the great world of business and tratflc
self-reliant and grand, self-respectinI
men and women to make more proui
and rich this your lovely South.
In no ray can these desirable result
be brought about better than by tn
diversified farming and fruit industrie
of the small farmers and which We ar
here to encourage and stimulate 1t
useless for me to tell you THAT the dair
: has brought comfortable living an
even competency to hundreds OF thou
sands of families in the North on sma
: farms, where they often have to lee
! four and Eve months in winter, an
have large and expensive barns fo
: shelter, What cannot be done here !
: q climate like this, and such maFks
: close at your doors as New Oriear
Q offersf
4 Why, Mr.. President, and ladies an
gentlemen of this convention, if there
: no serious natural obstacle to dair
farming in this State, / cannot see VII
6 this would not be q very paradise II
. winter dairying. That il the deman
lof the times and the present conditi0
VI of things. Bogus butter men depen
lupop the lack in the supply of goo
, tpure. true COW butter in winter, to puf
Z this miserable fraud upon the maFke
b It does seem to me, here is an openiE
I that any true dairyman might w
y Ieovet and fll.